AMD Delivers New Athlon Server Chip

Advanced Micro Devices said Tuesday it has begun shipping its latest Athlon MP 2400+ processor for high-performance servers and workstations.
AMD said Tuesday it has begun shipping its latest Athlon MP 2400+ processor for high-performance servers and workstations.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based semiconductor maker is hoping the new chip will grab market share from rival Intel, which sells a comparable Xeon processor. AMD currently has its 2400+, 2200, and 2000+ chips availble.

The chip's new x86 architecture includes Smart MP technology, which allows for data movement between the two CPUs, chipsets, and memory system. Smart MP technology features dual point-to-point, high-speed 266 MHz system buses with Error Correcting Code (ECC) support designed to provide up to 2.1 GB per second per CPU of bus bandwidth in a dual-processor system.

The Athlon 2400+ also has QuantiSpeed architecture, which includes a full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch, a fully pipelined superscalar floating point engine, and an exclusive L2 Translation Look-aside Buffer. The processor also incorporates 3DNow! Professional technology, which has 51 new instructions that extend AMD's 3DNow! technology.

"With the AMD Athlon MP processor and its superior floating point capability, leading enterprises and research institutes can get the high performance they need to stay in front of their computing requirements," said AMD vice president Marty Seyer.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITECH) has one of several AMD Athlon MP processor-based supercomputers on the TOP500 Supercomputer list.

TITECH uses its AMD Athlon MP processor-based system for building a large grid computing infrastructure, which in turn is used for various high-end applications, such as terascale data processing in high-energy physics, advanced bioinformatics, and large scale numerical optimizations.

AMD Tuesday also said Rambler, one of the leading Internet portals in Russia, has selected servers from Tyan Platforms based on AMD Athlon MP processors to upgrade its search system.